Embodiments of the present invention provide a “revenues increasing the budget” feature for financial management software modules that are commonly found in enterprise management applications.
Enterprise management applications “EMAs”), such as the R/3 application commercially available from SAP AG, permit computer systems to manage the business operations of some of the largest organizations in the world. EMAs include several integrated systems, including financial management systems, materials management systems, financial accounting systems, fund management systems, asset management systems, and the like.
“Ledgers” are a well known component of financial management software. Generally, a ledger represents a view into general transaction data according to a predetermined filtering scheme. For example, a first ledger, typically a general ledger, may be established to distinguish different expense types such as materials, infrastructure, salary, etc., according to a predetermined chart of accounts. A second, different ledger may be established to distinguish (and thus track) different projects or funds managed by the organization according to perhaps different accounting principles. Other ledgers might be set up to reflect additional aspects of the transaction data.
“RIB” techniques are known per se in financial management software. RIB is an acronym for “revenues increasing the budget.” In many financial applications, expenditure budgets of a predetermined business unit such as an organization or department are based upon revenues of that business unit. Financial management software having RIB management features track revenues and determine changes to expenditure budget based upon predetermined rules.
A RIB rule represents a transform from revenue information to expenditure budget information. Within the RIB rule, there may be defined:                source addresses, representing locations of revenues,        destination addresses, representing locations of expenditure budget,        transform calculation, defining how expenditure budget is derived.Commonly, the transform calculation may define a transform coefficient (e.g., $1 increase in expenditure budget for every $2 in revenue), certain thresholds that must be exceeded before any increase in expenditure budget occurs (e.g., expenditure budget increased only after revenues exceed $100,000), or certain filtering conditions that occur as part of the calculation (e.g., increased expenditure budget occurs only for realized incoming payments, as opposed to customer invoices that have not been paid yet).        
In known RIB systems, increases of the expenditure budget are calculated directly from general ledger data. Modern EMAs, however, may operate on transaction databases having many millions of transaction items located therein. Depending on the rule by operating on the raw data, it might be not possible to perform the RIB rule sufficiently fast to have near real time calculation of RIB increases to budgetary values. Also auditing possibilities are limited. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a RIB calculation feature that generates RIB budgetary values in near real time and tracks all the changes to allow for a complete auditing.